Beyond the translation of the Pentateuch, in books like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job, or Proverbs, the differences are even greater. It can be observed that the Jewish community was not unaware of these differences between the Hebrew Bible of Jerusalem and the Greek Bible of Alexandria, and that problems arose, hyperbolically speaking, from the day after the translation. From the Greek fragments of Qumran and other pre-Christian papyri, we know that very early on there were attempts to correct the Greek to improve the translation, adapting it to the ongoing Hebrew text. Papyrus Fouad 266 (1st century BC), which contains fragments of Greek Genesis, and Papyrus Rylands 458 (first half of the 2nd century BC, meaning only a century after the translation of the Pentateuch), with fragments of Greek Deuteronomy, already present a revised text.
The most important evidence of this correction process towards the Hebrew text is found in the Greek fragments of the Twelve Prophets (50 BC- 50 AD) discovered in 1952 in Nahal Hever (near Qumran), published and interpreted by D. Barthélemy in the influential monograph Les Devanciers d'Aquila (Leiden 1963). These fragments confirmed that later Jewish translators, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, had been preceded by a process of revisions of the Greek Bible to adapt it to the proto-Masoretic consonantal Hebrew text that the rabbis would define as the standard text at the end of the 1st century AD. The revisions of the Septuagint did not only go in this direction; in parallel, the text was also subjected to a revision to improve the literary style and eliminate the Semitisms inherent in the Greek translation, which were foreign to the ears of Greek speakers. (...)
However, the discoveries at Qumran starting in 1948 and their subsequent publication at the end of the 20th century have brought about a revolution in the history of the biblical text. In Qumran, fragments of the Greek Bible have been found in caves 4 and 7. But what has been most surprising are the discoveries of Hebrew texts, such as those of Samuel (4QSama,b,c) and some of Jeremiah (4QJerb,d), which coincide or are closer to the base text used by the Greek translators than to the proto-Masoretic text. These data have contributed to re-evaluating the Septuagint text and to giving a huge boost to studies of the Greek version. Indeed, it has been shown that the differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts could not simply be attributed to the incompetence of the translators or the translation techniques they employed; in many cases, they were translating from a Hebrew text different from the standardized one, which has only been partially recovered by chance among the Qumran documents. Thus, the problem of the plural and distinct Bibles is no longer limited to the differences between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, but this pluralism extends back to the primitive stage of the Hebrew text in the three centuries preceding the turn of the era. The Septuagint constitutes a first-rate instrument for understanding this textual pluralism and therefore occupies, along with Qumran, the forefront of the debate on the history of the biblical text today(...)
But it was not the texts themselves that divided Jews and Christians, for, as has been said, Christianity is the only religion born with a book in its cradle, the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek or the Old Testament. From a historical perspective, it is surprising that Jews and Christians, using the same texts, arrived at such different results that crystallized into two distinct religions: normative Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. The key to deciphering this enigma lies not so much in the texts they handled as in the different interpretations or readings they made of them. The authors of the New Testament began to interpret the Hebrew Bible, especially the Psalms and the Prophets, in light of the events (life, death, and resurrection) of Jesus of Nazareth. The Septuagint served as an intermediary and in most cases was the key to the new Christian interpretation. The mosaic of Septuagint citations and especially its multiple echoes influenced the drafting of the New Testament writings. The differing hermeneutics of the texts led to the bifurcation of paths, to the first Judeo-Christian polemics, and ultimately to the rupture between the two religions. The Septuagint would also be the Bible of the early Christians and the Church Fathers and would contribute decisively to shaping the theological language of Christian thought(...)
In the centuries preceding the turn of the era, a list of authorized books existed. The most cited, both in the Qumran community and in the New Testament, are the Pentateuch, Psalms, and Isaiah, but the Qumran community probably also admitted the books of Enoch and Jubilees, meaning a broader list than that admitted in the Hebrew canon of Judaism. In Qumran, a textual pluralism also coexisted, i.e., Hebrew texts different from the proto-Masoretic text that would be standardized at the end of the 1st century CE by the rabbis. In this era, the boundaries between biblical and parabiblical texts were not yet defined, and some of the books that would later be accepted as authoritative and included in the canon fluctuated. This is why publications such as The Qumran Bible or new editions and translations into modern languages of the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic Writings of the Old Testament, also called Intertestamental Writings, have recently been appearing. All these publications expand our knowledge of Second Temple Judaism, the literary framework in which it developed, and illuminate the climate of cultural effervescence around the turn of the era in which both normative Judaism and Christianity were born. Within this literary and socio-religious horizon, the Greek translation of the Bible must be situated as a bridge between the plural Hebrew Bible of Qumran and the writings of the New Testament and early Christians.
